Response Paper
McCloskey Article (278.205 Kb)
Having completed the unit of philosophy of religion, you are now ready to respond to an article written by an actual atheist. This article, titled “On Being an Atheist,” was written by H. J. McCloskey in 1968 for the journal Question. McCloskey is an Australian philosopher who wrote a number of atheistic works in the 1960s and 70s including the book God and Evil (Nijhoff, 1974). In this article, McCloskey is both critical of the classical arguments for God’s existence and offers the problem of evil as a reason why one should not believe in God.
Your assignment is to read his short article, attached above, and respond to each of the questions below. The basis for your answers should …show more content…

o McCloskey implies that evolution has displaced the need for a designer. Assuming evolution is true, for argument’s sake, how would you respond to McCloskey (see Evans pp. 82-83)? o McCloskey claims that the presence of imperfection and evil in the world argues against “the perfection of the divine design or divine purpose in the world.” Remembering Evans’ comments about the limitations of the cosmological argument, how might you respond to this charge by McCloskey? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3. McCloskey's criticisms of the teleological argument
The objections in this section are based on his want for "indisputable" proofs (p.64) of design in the same manner as there are supposedly indisputable proofs for evolution. The primary difficulty of evolution is that is has no proof of the actual existence of first organism development nor the actual pattern of this evolution. The whole theory is based on biological likeness between organisms. The weakness of this argument is many. First, the change from simple forms to such complex forms of diverse species. Did we all exist as the same simple organism or did many simple organisms exist and evolve? In either case, there is no foundation for understanding where those first life forms came from. At the same time, other things come into play that we do not understand. For example, are we part descendents from Dinosaurs? If they were erased